A rapid improvement of intellectual systems capable of performing creative functions, which was in the past viewed as a unique human ability, has been a breakthrough in the technology progress of recent years. As access to it became available for a wide range of people, the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) in various spheres of human activities has rocketed. This phenomenon, however, is fraught with negative consequences — the use of AI systems for criminal purposes. The authors describe the character of such threats, and review the results of their analysis by foreign researchers, as this problem emerged abroad somewhat earlier than in our country. The application of international experience of counteracting the criminal use of artificial intelligence while taking into consideration national specifics is also useful from the standpoint of predicting further dynamics of the situation and reducing its negative consequences. The authors discuss such problems associated with the use of AI systems as the violation of copyright in generating images, the creation speech and video deepfakes for distance fraud and extortion, the dissemination of pornography, and discrediting people. The growing public danger of harassment and humiliation in AI-assisted cyberbullying is stressed. The case when a West European person committed suicide after communication with a chat bot of an AI system is highlighted, together with the fact that the bots’ creators were not prosecuted. Discussions on determining the subject of crimes in cases of accidents involving UAVs are studied, dangerous trends in the use of AI products in the military sphere are identified, and the necessity of prohibiting “autonomous weapons” at the international level is stressed. The authors analyze first attempts at the legal regulation of the use of AI products and propose the following measures of preventing, neutralizing and reducing the risks of AI systems’ malicious use: user verification, labeling of AI-created products, testing new systems for possible criminal use, quick reaction to criminal incidents by working out recommendations for their prevention, improvement of the systems to identify a covert use of AI, legislative changes that take into account new facts of publicly dangerous actions, limitation of the use of AI instruments in specific spheres (military, jurisprudence, expert work) and determination of the possibilities to use them for completing creative qualifying work, competition tasks, dissertations.
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